PRISM Journal
PRISM Early View (2023) https://doi.org/10.24377/prism.article722
https://doi.org/10.24377/prism.article722 1 © 2023 PRISM, ISSN: 2514-5347
The Slow Learner: Feeling our way to Thinking
about Lifelong Learning
Derek Barter
Department of Adult and Community Education, Maynooth University, Ireland
(derek.barter@mu.ie).
Received: 26/10/2022
Accepted for publication: 05/02/2023
Published: 21/08/2023
Abstract
This article is a critique of the current formal education system as a construct for
consumerism, where the value of learning is geared towards increasingly limited
instrumentalist ends. It considers alternative ways of educating the population to
prepare for a century of disruption and upheaval as we transition from an unsustainable
fossil fuel-based economy, where competition and acquisition are lauded to a less
frenetic, but ultimately more egalitarian reflective future. It argues against the short-
term myopia of credentialism, determined by election cycle politics and competitive
advantage, and instead posits a humanistic vision for community education and teaching
innovation that takes the longue durée regard of the history of human relations into
account.
Accepting Gellner’s exo-socialisation model for mass education in the industrial age,
it asks what will replace this in a post-industrial world. Beginning with the principles of
widening participation and social inclusion as the starting points for a socially just
education, it argues that relationships are central for emancipatory education to take
effect. It uses two programmes offered by Maynooth University’s Department of Adult
and Community Education, the Communiversity and the Critical Skills modules: A Social
Analysis of Everyday Life, as examples of programmes that have inclusion, equality and
diversity, and social justice as core principles in their modus operandi. Here
participation, dialogue, reflection, and a willingness to engage offer hope for an
intergenerational lifelong learning approach to education in the twenty-first century that
is ‘thought led’ rather than ‘market driven’.
Keywords: Access, capabilities approach, Communiversity, emancipatory learning, inclusion,
instrumentalism, lifelong learning, widening participation
1. What is the purpose of education?
Education should not set out to diminish the
person; it should not harm or cause pain, it should not
reduce, belittle or demean. It should not coerce the
person into doing, or causing to be done, anything
that will have a negative effect upon the person, their
community or their society. Yet education does these
things to people all the time. As part of a capitalist
https://doi.org/10.24377/prism.article722
https://doi.org/10.24377/prism.article722
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economy, it initiates us into an economic system that
acts against our best interests in favour of short-term
wealth and material accumulation. From an early age,
it subjugates the imagination into conformity for the
sake of efficiency, and stifles enquiry into other
possible ways of being in the world for ever-
increasing productivity (Greene, 1995). This paper will
ask if the Western education model is providing
students with the knowledge, skills and confidence
that they need to survive and thrive in the twenty-first
century (Giroux, 2022). It will consider the mission of
the university as this is currently understood in a time
when policy makers look askance at subjects and
disciplines that are deemed impractical, esoteric and
ineffective in terms of employment, opting instead to
be ‘market led’ without referencing the fact that in
Ireland at least the market has led to a banking crisis,
a housing crisis, and globally to the brink of
environmental disaster in the shape of the looming
climate catastrophe.
An education that is solely beholden to increased
productivity and enhanced income potential is an
education that makes us all poorer. As the
introduction to social media is established in the very
earliest years of infancy (Reid Chassiakos, et al., 2016;
Smyth, 2022), exposure to a consumerist discourse
inflates desire and entitlement ever earlier in the
child’s consciousness. The collusion of a functionalist
education system that underpins a capitalist narrative
of success as one of material acquisition and
possession should, in the present era of
environmental crisis, at least raise questions and
prompt policy makers and civil servants involved in
decision making around education to reflect. In
Ireland 83% (80% men and 86% women) of students
complete second-level education as compared with
79% on average across OECD countries (OECD, 2019).
The trend of direct progression from second-level to
third-level education is also above average (OECD,
2020). This has had unintended consequences to
pushing people into professional employment and
away from trades and services, which now face labour
shortages.
In the policy paper Progressing A Unified Tertiary
System for Learning, Skills and Knowledge
(Government of Ireland, 2022), the Irish Department
of Further and Education, Research, Innovation and
Science is currently attempting to rebalance the
educational landscape to meet the ongoing economic
and societal demands in construction, retail,
hospitality and the caring professions by diverting an
increasing number of young people into Further
Education and Training courses and apprenticeships
(2022). Education has become equated with skills
acquisition.
This paper will make a case for a fundamental
restructuring of the education system away from a
frontloaded jobs-oriented instrumentalist-based
form of learning towards a lifelong learning,
strengths-based ‘capabilities approach’ (Sen, 1992).
The capabilities approach, first proposed in the 1980s
by the economist Amartya Sen, is based on two
assumptions. First, that freedom to achieve well-
being is of primary moral importance. Second, that
freedom to achieve well-being must be understood in
terms of people with capabilities. In other words,
their real opportunities to do, and be, what they value
(Walker & Unterhalter, 2007). It will argue that the
current education system is a hazing process whereby
certain academic subjects and disciplines are
apotheosised for their earning potential, while
devaluing what has been a core purpose of education
or at least university education up until recently, as
the ‘effort to make capable and cultivated human
beings’ (Mill, 1867, p. 4). It will also argue that the way
out is through a real commitment to lifelong learning
where adult and community education pedagogical
practice can encourage and instil confidence in the
learner, and by extension the community of learners,
to face the great challenges that lie ahead over the
course of the coming century.
2. Instrumentalism
In 2011, Maynooth University (MU) in Ireland set
up a working group to respond to the National
Strategy for Higher Education to 2030 (Government
of Ireland, 2011), more commonly referred to as the
Hunt Report. The Hunt Report was drafted in the
aftermath of the banking crisis and economic crash of
2008 in Ireland, and although it takes the 2000 White
Paper Learning for Life (Government of Ireland, 2000)
as its point of departure, its tone is much less
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idealistic. It is redolent with the shock of the crash,
the political and social repercussions of the Bank
Guarantee,1 and is determined to future-proof the
Irish Higher Education system for the benefit of
‘Ireland Inc.’ What emerged from the Hunt Report
was a greater influence for business and industry
within the education sector. However, it also held out
the promise of widening participation and civic
engagement, two of the central platforms for Access
in education. One immediate development was the
Springboard initiative2 informed by the Expert Group
on Future Skills Needs (EGFSN). Given that Ireland is a
small open economy that relies heavily on its ability
to attract Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) from
transnational conglomerates like Facebook (Meta),
Google, TikTok etc., the skills concentrated on Science
Technology Engineering and Maths (STEM) subjects,
conversion courses in Information Communication
Technology (ICT), big data analytics, supply chain, and
export sector-led courses were, and still are, given
precedence. For indigenous industries, tourism and
hospitality were emphasised. In the years following
2008, Ireland’s economic survival was dependent
upon the so-called Troika of the European
Commission, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and
the European Central Bank (ECB). Severe austerity
measures were imposed on the country, and lifelong
learning and funded part-time programmes were
directed towards Labour Market Activation (one
exception to this was the Communiversity
programme which is discussed later).
The discourse surrounding education and Higher
Education at this time leant heavily towards the
‘knowledge economy,’ ‘skills and employability,’
1 The Bank Guarantee officially called The Credit
Institutions (Financial Support) Act 2008 provided a €440
billion guarantee to six Irish banks to prevent possible
collapse of Ireland’s economy as a result of the financial
crisis of 2007–2008.
2 Springboard+ is a government initiative offering free and
heavily subsidised courses at certificate, degree, and
masters level leading to qualifications in areas where
there are employment opportunities in the economy.
These areas include ICT, engineering, green skills,
manufacturing and construction, among many others.
There are over 300 courses available for 2022-23, the
majority of which are flexible and part-time.
https://springboardcourses.ie/.
‘earning potential,’ ‘career choice,’ and the
promotion of STEM above all else. This understanding
still prevails, and it is little wonder, therefore, that
Instrumentalism (Mezirow, 1990) is on the increase in
Ireland just as it is in the UK (Duckworth & Smith,
2018). In Ireland, the EU-funded Human Capital
Initiative July Stimulus 2020 pushed micro-credentials
as a way to drive up the country’s low participation
rates in lifelong learning (Solas, 2020).3 These are
again overwhelmingly skills focussed.
The Hunt Report recommended more influence
for business and industry in education. The MU
Response had one overarching theme which can be
summed up as: Higher Education Institutions should
welcome CEOs at faculty meetings when philosophers
are invited into the boardroom. The response sought
to encourage the university to engage with the
capitalist economy in a way that would include
calculations that go beyond shareholder dividends
and profit margins, to make decisions that have some
element of moral and ethical considerations inbuilt. It
asks that the university asserts itself as a place of
thoughtful contemplation that sometimes has to be
critical of the status quo, and the received wisdom
that market is always correct. The risks that face us as
a species threaten to overwhelm an instrumentalist
educational paradigm (Duckworth & Smith, 2018)
predicated on perpetual economic growth. Education
in the twenty-first century must allow for thinking and
reflection, for history, philosophy and politics as well
as other disciplines from Arts and Humanities to be
promoted in schools (Earle et al., 2017). Critical
disciplines such as these move the conversation on
from the applied sciences, solution focused education
3 SOLAS was established in 2013 under the Further
Education and Training Act as an agency of the
Department of Further and Higher Education, Research,
Innovation and Science. It replaced the previous skills and
training in further education agency Fás whose
expenditure in the Celtic Tigre era had brought that
organisation into disrepute. It also absorbed the
Vocational Education Committees (VECs) as the
reconfigured Education and Training Boards (ETBIs). The
ETBIs emphasised their training remit above education.
Currently, lifelong learning is measured by SOLAS using
the EU approved Labour Force Survey (LFS) to calculate
the share of adults aged 25-64 who had engaged in formal
and/or nonformal learning.
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- ‘we have the technology so we can do it’, to a
deliberative, slower form of learning that asks the
moral question ‘But should we?’ Even to ask such a
question could be seen as radical in its naivety, but to
make a choice not to merely go along is in some sense
a political act.
3. Access
Any discussion about social justice education
inevitably turns its attention to access as part of the
inclusion and widening participation agenda (Boud in
Osborne and Crossan, 2007). Great strides have been
made in Ireland in terms of access since the first
National Access Plan in 2015. However, access itself is
not an unproblematic idea (Rowan, 2019). Access
means different things to different people at different
times of their life. For instance, access in relation to
school children often assumes that it is about getting
children from so called ‘disadvantaged’ backgrounds
into Higher Education. Access for people with a whole
range of disabilities means an educational
psychological or medical diagnosis is referenced
against some notional norm, whereby ‘less than’, or
at least ‘not the same as’, is taken into account.
Access for mature students is often thought of as
‘second chance’, to make up for something they
missed out on first time around. Access within the
migrant community, especially those who are caught
up in the asylum process, means something akin to
meeting one’s basic needs. In all cases though, access
is associated with ‘difference’. This assumption is
loaded with negative connotations indicating
‘deficiency’ of some sort in either the individual or the
community they come from. This is an enormous
barrier to the very people that access programmes
are set up to engage, and in that sense, becomes
exclusionary. People in the process of addiction
recovery often speak about their recovery as ‘an
inside job’; the same sentiment applies to members
of underserved and disadvantaged communities.
Perhaps the language of access needs to be looked at
and the lexicon of lifelong learning be embraced and
4 Coolock is a parish in north Dublin with a high number of
social housing and council housing and is considered an
promoted (Osborne et al., 2007) as the starting point
of any discussion around education. However,
changing the vocabulary is not enough; to change the
discourse, we also need to examine the practices of
education and move towards a capabilities approach.
If access is thought about with capabilities in mind,
then the demand that the university becomes more
embedded and relevant in the lives of people beyond
the campus walls enables us to pursue a form of
democratic and emancipatory education with the
population at large. A socially just education will be
one that is shaped by, and responds to, the
communities and individuals that participate in the
conversation. The conversation will recognise the
human relations embedded in every learning
encounter, and the conversation will be open-ended
and open to all (Rowan, 2019). These are the
principles to which both the Communiversity and
Critical Skills modules - A Social Analysis of Everyday
Life, Reflective Practice and Experiential Learning,
adhere.
4. The Communiversity and Critical Skills A
Social Analysis of Everyday Life
The Communiversity is a three-way partnership
established in the Republic of Ireland in 2011
between Maynooth University (MU), community-
based organisations in the form Local Development
Companies, and the Public Library Service. For each
partner there are particular policy demands that
come under the general headings of social inclusion,
widening participation, community development and
capacity building. It operates in underserved
communities and areas designated in terms of Higher
Education as being ‘socially disadvantaged’. The
Communiversity in Coolock4 has been operating since
2011. I have been delivering critical skills modules in
the university since 2016. My idea for Critical Skills
was predicated on the understanding of the sense of
bewilderment that many, if not all, new students to
the university have upon entry. The most difficult
thing for first year student to do in the early part of
the semester is to get them to engage and open up.
area disadvantage according to the Pobal Deprivation
Index.
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A criticism that is often levelled at students coming
straight from secondary school is that they are not
prepared, or do not know how, to study at third level.
There is a tendency on behalf of academics to think
of students as needing to be deprogrammed. In fact,
what they need is the space to decompress, to
unwind and allow themselves to become themselves.
Both programmes rely on dialogue, discussion and
play as the basis for learning, and content is co-
produced and co-created.
5. Vignette
In early March 2022 I held a Critical Skills class for
first year undergraduates, and a Critical Thinking
workshop as part of the Coolock Communiversity on
the same day. This is a composite reflection of what
happened in both groups. To start both classes, I
asked the participants to write a haiku:
A what?
A haiku, a traditional Japanese poem.
I can’t write poetry.
No way, I couldn’t write poetry.
A poem not a chance.
What’s it called?
A haiku.
What is it?
A poem of 17 syllables. 5 then 7 then 5. You can
write about the weather, nature, the seasons, how
you are feeling, whatever.
I couldn’t write a poem.
Who says so?
I was no use at writing in school.
This isn’t school. I’ll give you 10 minutes to write it
and see how you get on.
It won’t be any good.
Let us be the judge of that.
[I set the timer and the clock ticks by. The look of
pain on peoples’ faces].
Nearly there, two minutes and then you will get a
chance to read them out to the rest of the group.
What?!!
Ah here, I didn’t sign up for this.
Ok, who wants to go first?
[Silence].
I’ll go. It’s not very good though.
Why do you say that? We haven’t heard it yet, let
us be the judge.
[The poem is beautiful, and everybody claps
spontaneously. The girl is beaming]. Can we hear it
again? And again, one more time. Everyone agrees
that was really lovely. Who’s next? I’ll go to get it
out of the way.
[Again, everyone is enthralled.] Great stuff let’s
hear it again.
I only managed to write two lines.
We’ll have a go then at adding the last line. And we
did and she was happy.
Who wants to go next?
I didn’t get it. I did it wrong.
Did you write something?
Yes.
Ok, can we hear it?
I don’t know how to
Write a poem that is like this,
This is not very good.
Everyone clapped. I said there are too many syllables
in the last line (ignoring the rest, form, like all rules,
is there to be broken). The look on her face was
heart-breaking. Then a classmate said ‘Take out
‘not.’’ She said it again:
I don’t know how to
Write a poem that is like this
This is very good.
Cheers, claps, smiles and laughter all around.
The question that the exercise provoked for me
from both groups, differentiated only by the age
profile and the locations of the two classes (one on
campus and one in a library), is ‘What has our
education system done to us that makes us feel like
we have failed before we have even started?’ The
language of ‘I can’t’ or ‘I wasn’t any good’ translates
into ‘not good enough so why bother’. This feeling of
inadequacy can follow us for the rest of our lives. Here
is the locus of dis-engagement from education, and
the manqué of access policies. The recognition that
feeling, learning, and thinking are part of the same
process (Bion, 1967) can liberate us from the tyranny
of the past failures and the damning effects of
memory. Connecting with ‘emotional energy’ as
Mullineaux puts it ‘the integration of feeling with
thinking – [is] a vital component in the learning
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process’ (2008, p. 90). Kincheloe argues, that we need
to be able to create alternative educations ‘grounded
on a critical theoretical commitment to social justice,
anti-oppressive ways of being, and new forms of
connectedness and radical love’ (Kincheloe, 2008, p.
6). This is where social justice education can act as an
antidote to the limiting structures and processes of
knowledge transfer and skills acquisition.
Shortly after these classes I met an academic
from a university in the Czech Republic who spoke
rather despairingly about the current state of
education: ‘The young people nowadays don’t study,
they don’t go to the library and get a book out, they
don’t remember anything, they just go to their
phones and look it up. And they don’t think, they feel.’
He’s not wrong. I replied that ‘feelings come first, it’s
feelings that determine behaviour’. Traditionally,
universities as places of rational discourse, scientific
endeavour, and evidence- based research don’t do
feelings very well; however not recognising the fact
that human beings are to a great extent driven by our
unconscious desires and primal emotions misses a
crucial element in the learning process.
Ivan Illich, in his famous work De-schooling
Society (1970), can be accused of being unrealistically
dismissive of the established education system.
However, the idea that institutionalised ‘education’,
and the universal application of it across the globe is
an unquestioning good must, for any critical thinker,
be questioned. There are benefits to education, but
if the sole purpose is to reproduce a workforce for an
economic system that relies on reproducing
repressive regimes of thought and suppressing
emotions, with the purpose of perpetual economic
growth, then this is not good. If the purpose of
education in the twentieth century was to educate
idiots (in the classical Athenian sense of individuals
who disconnected from the polis/community) with
profit as their main motivation, then we have to ask
what is the purpose of education in the twenty first
century? Gellner (1983) suggests that mass
education, or exo-socialisation in the modern
industrial nation state, is the vehicle for cultural
transmission and individual identity made manifest in
the nation state. That being the case, then, it is to be
expected that the dominant economic philosophy of
the state administration will prevail. However, when
the industrial base of modern society – that of ‘high-
powered technology and the expectancy of sustained
growth’ (p.33) – is called into question, then the
education system that it supports must also be held
up for examination. It has become apparent that
recognising our inter-dependence and relationships
with all kinds of people and the environment must
take precedence. This means educating people to
expect less in terms of material possessions, and to
recognise our duties to each other as a species and to
our planet as custodians for future generations
(Ryan, 2009). In order to do this, according to Burns,
we must begin ‘a process of unlearning our
unsustainability and relearning our entanglement
with the world’ (2018, p. 278). In a social justice
model of education, environmental education
(Mullineaux, 2008), alongside the critical disciplines
from the Arts and Social Sciences, would be given
room on the curriculum and valued as much as any of
the disciplines with high earning potential. In fact,
this very discourse of education and earnings must be
reflected on and held up to scrutiny.
The design of our current education system is to
establish and solidify boundaries in early years
through a more abstract form of learning than that of
the pure experiential type that all humans experience
when they come into the world. It sets up the type of
learning that is about content acquisition, and the
beginning of a selection process based on a set of
values determined by economic forces. A feedback
loop is established that starts to rank knowledge by
its added value to the economy with maths and
science at the apex.
The shift in emphasis for the learner from one of
relationships to one of control and selection becomes
internalised in school. The natural inclination for the
child is to be a philosopher, a seeker and an explorer.
Early life is all about taking risks, crawling, probing,
reaching, tasting. These philosophers/explorers are
slowly gelded (Gellner, 1983, p.36) from climbing,
skipping, tumbling and falling animated beings, into
clerks, by denying their bodies in the restraining
environment of the classroom into sedentary
receptacles of second-hand knowledge (Freire,
1970). Furthermore, through what Skinner termed
operant conditioning (1974), the child’s behaviour is
modified through a series of rewards and
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punishments which bestow a sense of achievement
or failure. Punishment has shifted from the body to
the mind. Behaviour modification takes place in
response to the ‘aversive stimuli’ (Skinner, 1974) of
competitive learning, with the inevitable winners and
losers being drawn into the learning experience.
Hence the environment for self-imposed exclusion is
introduced as the loser gets ‘knocked out’ early and
often from the competition. Feelings of shame and
inadequacy then become associated with learning.
Skinner would go further to say that ‘…behaviour
does not change because [the student] feels anxious;
it changes because of the aversive contingencies
which generate the condition felt as anxiety. The
change in feeling and the change in behaviour have a
common cause’ (1974, p. 68).
Where disenchantment leads, disengagement
follows. I have observed the Maths Wall of Fame in
second class in a primary school where the same five
or six children made it onto the gallery every week,
just rotating their positions. Pupils who try their best,
but who don’t achieve the honour roll, give up and
disengage from the subject at a relatively young age.
In conversation with a colleague who delivers the
maths component of the Froebel teacher Training in
Maynooth University, such unintended undermining
is commonplace in maths games and exercises where
he described ‘speed in answering the question
correctly is all that matters.’ Speed and conformity
these are the hallmarks of success in a stifling system
of education (Ross in Rancière, 1991, p. xx). My
colleague sees this as a failure on the part of the
teaching profession as the knockout nature of these
games excludes the slower learner from the subject
before they ever get a chance to become familiar
with it. Opting out of something that brings no
reward, but rather compounds a sense of repeated
failure and its accompanying shame, seems very
wise. Shame demotivates the learner and distorts
‘normal’ development. Coping strategies such as
hiding, avoiding and deflecting become associated
with learning thus creating a minus-Valency (Hafsi,
2005) where education is repulsed.
Repairing this relationship is part of the
transformative process (Mezirow, 1990; 1991; 2000;
Mezirow et al., 2009) that adults experience when
they re-engage with education in later life.
Unfortunately, due to the instrumentalist nature of
government policies towards lifelong learning, this
aspect of learning is for the most part ignored when
it comes to funding, unless it is specifically targeted
at marginalised groups such as people in recovery
from drug addiction or mental health conditions. If it
was to be recognised as applying to the general
population, it holds out great potential to move
beyond instrumentalism.
The fault does not necessarily lie in the
individual teacher, nor in the profession of teaching,
but rather in the structures of education and the
simplistic goal to serve the economy. To reorient
education into a sustainable humanistic model
requires some deliberation about the job
specification of the teacher in the twenty first
century, and the nature of teaching at different life
stages. Reconfiguring the teaching profession and the
culture of education is not beyond our ken. It starts
with looking critically at how we relate to each other
as human beings, and what it is we want to do, to
employ our social imagination as Greene puts it
(1995) for the cause of a more socially just form of
education. The acquisition of knowledge arising from
the banking method of teaching (Freire, 1970)
facilitates socio-economic, cultural selection through
a series of tests and exams that merely reinforces the
competitive aspect of learning. Competition for high
points, good grades for elite courses, medicine,
veterinary, IT, Business and Economics ensure that
intellectual hegemony is maintained, and the class
consensus for individual ownership and wealth
accumulation is reproduced. What gets lost is ‘the
process of becoming one’s self’ which Charles,
interpreting Winnicott and Bion, says, ‘is much more
important than ‘receiving’ knowledge (2004, p.15).
To ‘know thyself’, and consequently understand the
decisions and actions that we take, surely is the
ultimate goal of education. To know thyself is central
to Sen’s Capabilities Approach (Conlin, 2019), just as
it is for Critical Skills – A Social Analysis of Everyday
Life and the Communiversity.
6. Capabilities and critical thinking
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Capabilities is understood as ‘alternative things a
person can do or be’ (Yaqub, 2009, p.437). As Naz
(2020, p.316) points out:
Sen expanded the notion of human well-being
beyond consumption and developed better measures
of poverty and inequality. He has introduced a
different view of human economic agents having
some intrinsic worth rather than being just rational
utility maximisers. His notion of well-being also
encompasses development of human potential by
increasing the options available to individuals in any
society. Sen asserted that when making normative
evaluations about a valuable life, the focus should be
on what people are able to be and to do, and not just
on the material resources that they are able to
consume.
Education using capabilities, then, is a strengths-
based approach, and is seen as the vehicle and
process by which the individual can achieve this
desired outcome. It critiques the current Western
model of education for establishing ‘acquisition and
competition’ instead of ‘cooperation and sharing’ as
core to its mission. Curiously, every year since I began
teaching Critical Skills - A Social Analysis of Everyday
Life, I have asked students to consider the notion of
‘success’. Overwhelmingly fairness, justice, rights to a
dignified life, and respect come out as the most
common answers. Idealism is, perhaps, to be
expected at the age of these students in their late
teens, but it is a virtue that can be too easily
dismissed. These ideals are also emerge in the
discussions that take place in the Communiversity
amongst older students.
This objective of the Communiversity remains to
engage people who regard Higher Education as
distant, alien and unobtainable, in a university level
course in a secure, familiar and local environment for
individual personal development, and capacity
building at a community level. As mentioned above,
the idea for the Communiversity developed out of
necessity brought on by the economic crash of 2008.
The conditions that prevailed in Ireland in the first
number of years of the programme were those of
severe austerity. The section of society hardest hit
were the so-called areas of disadvantage where those
in which the services of Local Development
Companies (LDC) were most heavily relied on. LDCs
implement community development programmes on
behalf of the State for social inclusion, education and
employment schemes. The Communiversity was an
attempt to continue with the educational and
community development work that the Department
of Adult and Community Education (DACE) in
Maynooth University had been involved with for
nearly forty years up to that point. What made the
Communiversity different at that time, and still to this
day, is that it runs counter to the labour market
activation skills acquisition instrumentalism, and
encourages dialogue, participation, curiosity and
reflection (Barter & Hyland, 2020).
Partnership and outreach are the two
cornerstones of this initiative. As publicly funded
bodies, each partner has a responsibility to
implement government policy in the areas of their
expertise. The Public Library service seeks, in Our
Public Libraries 2022 Inspiring, Connecting and
Empowering Communities (Government of Ireland,
2018), closer involvement with the local population.
For the community-based partners, the strategic
goals determined by the EU funded Social Inclusion
and Community Activation Programme (SICAP) –
especially Goal 2 for supporting individuals to engage
with lifelong learning – are increasingly informed by
more frequent contact between local community
adult education co-ordinators and the university. So
partnership is crucial, and the value of sharing public
services where policy outcomes converge is an
excellent example of joined up thinking. In purely
economic terms this adds value to each of the
partner’s output and productivity at low cost.
More importantly, however, the
Communiversity is about connecting people in a
learning environment where social, economic and
political phenomena that affect their lives can, with
the help of adult education facilitators and
academics, be debated and discussed in a meaningful
way. It can act as an access gateway, or pre-access
programme, for people to enter Further and Higher
Education if they wish. For many participants it may
be the first point of contact with Higher Education, or
even the concept of lifelong learning. In terms of
widening participation (Barter and Hyland, 2020), the
internal psychological and emotional barriers to
PRISM (2023) Barter (2023)
PRISM 9 Early view
access that have been outlined above present the
first, and perhaps most intransigent, stumbling blocks
that need to be overcome.
An advantage that the Communiversity has over
other learning initiatives is that it is not accredited.
This freedom from credentials means that people can
use it for non-instrumental reasons, as a meeting
place, a place to make friends, a place to talk about
complicated issues that are normally the reserve of
‘important people’ on the television, or on other
forms of media. It takes everyday issues and presents
the work of the academy in a way that is relevant to
the lives of the participants in an environment where
people are treated as equals and with respect.
One of the most positive outcomes from the
Communiversity has been the establishment of the
Communiversity Network (CN). This is a loose
affiliation of community-based adult guidance
counsellors, adult and community education co-
ordinators, lifelong learning officers, and local
employment staff who work for LEADER Partnership
Companies, Local Development Companies and Local
Employment Offices across Ireland. All of the
members are committed to social inclusion, some
working directly on the SICAP, while others seek to
move individuals into education, training or
employment or as part of an individualised
learning/care plan. In 2021 the CN submitted a
document to the consultation process of the National
Access Plan 2022-2028 called ‘Access All Areas’
(Author et al, 2021). Its starting point is a quote from
Theodore Zeldin which has become the guiding
principle of the Communiversity ‘…there is room for a
new sort of university that is not a ghetto for the
young, but a place where all generations can
exchange experience, culture and hope’ (Zeldin,
2012, p. 31).
Education for the twenty-first century must involve
the notion of living with uncertainty and insecurity.
Recognising and analysing these unstable states of
being is the surest form of dealing with them and
giving any hope of overcoming the external forces of
lack, scarcity and reduction that can mean liberation.
5 A pilot ComMUniversiTY is being delivered in 2022-2023
in Pobalscoil Neasain on Dublin’s Northside for Transition
Year students. Modules will include Anthropology,
The key to creating this kind of education is to take it
out of strictly dedicated educational institutions,
schools, colleges and universities, and bring it back to
into the community where it ripples out through webs
of relationships (Watts in Carlson & Maniacci, 2011)
to be animated in everyday life. Partnership with
likeminded organisations such as libraries and
community development companies can achieve
much more than the mere conferring on a
qualification. As one member of the Communiversity
Network put it:
Lifelong learning opportunities like Maynooth
University’s Communiversity foster a culture of
learning which has far reaching benefits for the wider
community. Subjects usually associated exclusively
with third level institutions, such as psychology,
philosophy, and economics, are explored in a more
informal environment such as the local library. Such
initiatives help to demystify third level education and
help to break down the barriers of esoteric
terminology and formalised assessment. The
programme…has far reaching implications; concepts
conventionally associated with higher learning are
discussed and shared and with family and friends.
Similar initiatives for younger demographics (e.g.
secondary schools and youth services) would help to
further demystify third level education. We find there
is great community interest but a lack of funding for
such initiatives (Antoinette Patton CN).
In Ireland we have an opportunity that is made
explicit in the National Access Plan submission for a
culture of real lifelong learning to be established from
the clichéd ‘cradle to the grave’. The way that second
level education in Ireland is structured with a
transition year break from solely academic subjects
between the Junior Cycle (GCSE) and the Leaving
Certificate exit exam, gives some space for teenagers
to explore their options in a structured way between
employment, volunteering, and exposure to
university subjects through the Communiversity -
which would include Critical Skills5 (Barter, et al.,
2021).
Philosophy/Critical Skills and Psychology with one off
contributions from Disability Studies, Cultural Heritage
https://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/15456/
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PRISM 10 Early view
7. Conclusion: Hope in unexpected places
Established elites maintain their position by
controlling the discourses of possible ways of being,
reproducing aspiring generations with the promise of
social mobility, and the rewards of wealth and status
that follow. Education is a powerful tool in
perpetuating hegemony (Bourdieu, 1992).
Dismantling the structures that reinforce such a
‘natural’ and tried and tested process of teaching and
learning will be a difficult task, but with what lies
ahead it is one worth attempting. Disrupting
longtime tried and tested ways of doing things might
sometimes be called for to bring about change in the
culture of education. For instance, the demographics
of the teaching profession in Ireland are
overwhelmingly single, white, middle-class females
coming straight from second-level school (Keane &
Heinz, 2015; Heinz & Keane, 2018). In other
professions, such an inexperienced and limited set of
life experiences would been seen as a negative.
Opening the profession up to people with more
experience, and in locations that are not designed to
stifle but to excite and innovate, holds out to
possibility of making the bond of human relationships
central to the learning activity. Group teaching and
co-facilitation could be considered. Employing
parents to support teachers in the classroom,
especially in early years, could recreate the ‘village’
or community environment of teaching. It could also
obviate some of the more traumatic episodes of
separation anxiety that everyone who, as a child or
with a child who, has cried at the school gate can
relate to. Such an initiative is not set out to
undermine the teaching profession, but to make use
of the natural resources, experience and expertise of
parents who are the primary educators through
socialisation in the home. Encouraging parents
themselves to become teachers should not be
beyond the scope of possibility.6
(including Archaeology) and Criminology. An evaluation
will be carried out at the end of the programme.
6 One of the aims of the Turn to Teaching project was
originally designed to bring adult students including
parents into Initial Teacher Training in their local
Adult education is often praised for the
transformational impact it has on a student’s life. It
can prompt rediscovery, rebirth, and changing
perspective to make new meanings out of long-held
assumptions and patterns of behaviour (Mezirow,
1990). If we can reimagine education as a process
over the life span, and not a series of hurdles in the
shape of skills acquisition for credentials, then
freedom awaits. This will not be easy as both the
individual learner and the institutions have a history
of understanding what education has been up to
now. Exo-socialisation for industrial society as
Gellner called it (1983, p. 38) will not work for the
post-industrial world that is needed for our species
survival. We will have to reimagine ourselves as
lifelong learners, and Higher Education Institutions
and, schools, will have to re imagine themselves as
places that are woven into our culture as
communities of equals, where we are all engaged in
varying pursuits that are part of the same
conversation.
Hope can be found in unexpected places,
though, and the emergency of the pandemic
provided some evidence that the whole education
system – from government departments to schools
and universities – can do things differently (Barter
and Grummell, 2021). When faced with the reality
that the usual way of working, (i.e. competition
through the sorting mechanism of high points in
exams for course entry), could not work, then we
were free to think differently and to use our ‘social
imagination’. The space to do this was created out of
necessity, and ‘care’ became a concern for
educational institutions and professions. We need to
do it again in the face of advances in Artificial
Intelligence, just as our colleague from the Czech
Republic pointed out and the climate crisis. It is time
to remind ourselves of just what the primary task of
education is: to understand and communicate, and
hopefully bring about, a socially just form of
communities with the support of the Community
organisation involved in the Communiversity. This
element of the initiative did not work out as originally
planned, but the potential for such an intervention is still
there.
PRISM (2023) Barter (2023)
PRISM 11 Early view
education that is ‘relationship-centred’ (Rowan,
2019, p.15) for all our sakes.
8. Disclosure statement
The author declares no potential conflicts of
interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.
9. Open Access Policy
This journal provides immediate open access to its
content with no submission or publications fees. This
journal article is published under the following
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distribute, print, search, or link to this article (and
other works in this journal), and/or to use them for
any other lawful purpose in accordance with the
licence.
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access database: DOAJ (the Directory of Open Access
Journals). DOAJ is a community-curated online
directory that indexes and provides access to high
quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.
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